The Big three Credit Bureaus have recently announced their new partnership to form the Vantage Score. This will take on the highly excepted FICO credit scoring system that most lenders use today when considering consumers for loans and different financial applications. The three credit bureaus claim that they formed this new scoring system in a response from societys demands for it but do we really need another credit score to monitor and try to ensure they contain no errors? Not until recent years has there finally been a push to make consumers more aware of their credit reports and the information contained on their credit history. This was a result of lawsuits and the publics demand to know how exactly FICO and the three Credit Bureaus were coming up with our credit scores. Now with identity theft affecting a large portion of our society, we have been forced to monitor our credit reports to not only get the best loan rates, but to protect ourselves from becoming a victim of identity theft. The new Vantage Score will not follow the same scoring system that we have become accustomed to. FICO scores range from 500-850, the new Vantage Score will range from 501-990 and have a letter grade ranging from A to F attached to them. Depending on how they decided to release our scores, numerically our alphabetically, this could be a bit deceiving to lenders. If we are now going to have to be judge on an all encompassing letter score that ranges 100 points per letter grade, we could be missing threshold loan rates without the lender knowing the whole truth about our credit history. For example, if we apply for loan and the lender says we will get a certain rate because we have a C rating in our Vantage Score, which is the range of 701-800, but we would have received a better rate in a B rating, and our credit score was a 798, is this new letter rating really helping consumers or hurting them? We have not yet been told when exact release date of our new Vantage credit scores will be, Experian is the only one that has said they will begin changing over their credit scoring system this summer. Until we know all the details we must wait to see how it all plays out. We need to have a credit rating system that will allow the consumers to be judged more fairly when being considered for loans, and I fear that this new Vantage Score will only hinder our ability to get the best loan rates possible for our financial situation. |
